It
is a piece of currency, quite frankly, that lacks currency – Senate Committee.
Have you ever felt that the penny, as a type of currency, is troublesome
for various reasons? You are not alone. For decades, the ongoing debate about
whether we should keep the penny or not had been concerned by many Canadian
citizens. I, personally, think that the penny has simply out-lived its purpose
and should be dropped.
According to the Royal Canadian Mint, in 1858, when penny was first
created, it was 96 percent of copper. 150 years later, even though the penny is
made out of steel with copper plating, it now costs 1.5 cent to create a cent.
Some might say that it’s only half a cent’s difference, but consider this:
Canadians had made 500 million of those last year alone! This would be a $2 500 000 loss! On top of that, roughly
31 billion pennies had been produced since 1908; the Canadian Government had
wasted billions of tax payer’s money on this worthless currency.
In 21st century, it’s certainly impossible for us to purchase
even the cheapest products in stores with a cent due to inflation. Prices of
almost all products had climbed up high enough that a penny doesn’t make a
difference anymore. Today, penny has lost 95 percent of its purchase power
since 1908, which means the penny today is equivalent to the toonie back then.
Therefore, it may have been a great help decades ago, but now, it has became a useless
piece of metal as currency.
As we all know, pennies are also notably inconvenient. According to the
Royal Canadian Mint, as I mentioned before, roughly 31 billion pennies have
been made, assuming one-third of it had disappeared, and that still left us
with 600 pennies per person spreading
over the house. All that could’ve been 6 loonies instead. When you are in
supermarkets, hospitals, restaurants or banks, it’s extremely time-consuming to
spend a large amount of time counting over pennies, the most worthless currency
we have. It is not helping trading as it is suppose to be, on the contrary, it
increases the trading cost.
Minting
penny is also a waste of resource. For instance, it costs nearly 20 percent
more to mint penny than nickel and it costs 90 percent more to mint penny than
loonie if try to mint the same value. Although we Canadians have a rich amount
of non-renewable resources such as steel and copper, but none of them should
ever be wasted.
Some might say that after dropping the penny, if we ever, there’s no way
that we could pay for prices $199.97 anymore. This problem can be solved by
rounding the prices to whole numbers. For instance, Australia dropped their 1
cent coin in 1990 and a study showed that it had no effect on inflation since
prices got rounded both up and down.
Canada’s Senate Committee on National Finance has recommended dropping
the penny. It’s still a mystery if The Canadian Government is going to act, but
one thing’s for sure: Let the penny drop, it certainly helps the Canadians’ everyday
life.
Kevin Wang 703
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